


Flower Crowns at Midnight

by WorryinglyInnocent



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Stargate Universe
Genre: A Monthly Rumbelling, F/M, Fluff, Rushbelle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 10:56:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22573000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorryinglyInnocent/pseuds/WorryinglyInnocent
Summary: Rushbelle. Rush finds Belle doing last minute wedding preparations in the middle of the night.Written for the @a-monthly-rumbelling moodboard prompt, availablehere.
Relationships: Belle (Once Upon a Time)/Nicholas Rush
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	Flower Crowns at Midnight

Rush would admit that he was surprised when he woke in the middle of the night to find Belle suspiciously absent from their bed. He was the one who got up at all hours because inspiration had struck, and he just _had_ to go and write down this latest theory and get the maths right before the numbers left him again. 

Belle had tried to get him just to keep a notebook beside the bed so that he didn’t traipse down to the basement all the time, and it had worked for a while, but Rush’s brain never tended to work within nice, reasonable limits, and his ideas, especially the ones that came along at three o’clock in the morning, needed far more space than a pocket Moleskine would provide. 

He reached over to the alarm clock, succeeding in knocking both it and his glasses off the nightstand, and he cursed under his breath before giving the entire thing up as a bad job and switching the lamp on. 

Belle was definitely not in the bedroom, nor was she in the bathroom, and on rescuing the clock and the glasses, Rush discovered that it was coming up for half-past two. 

He got out of bed, finding a t-shirt to throw on with his pyjama pants and getting his glasses tangled up in it. For someone who’d regularly gone twenty-four hours without sleep before, he really shouldn’t be so dopey when only half-awake. 

Finally, he was appropriately dressed for wandering around the house at night, and he set off in search of his fiancée.

Calling her fiancée in his mind was still a novelty despite the wedding now being only a few short weeks away, and it was thinking about the wedding that led him straight to Belle’s location. She was in the basement that served as their shared office/library space, taking up the entire footprint of the house. The half of the room that served as Belle’s library had been converted over the past six months into the wedding planning space, and this was where he found her, standing in front of the whiteboard she had purloined from him that had all of their plans pinned to it. 

She had her hands on her hips, stance set, and were it not for the flower crown on her head, Rush would have said that she was thinking very seriously about something. Perhaps she was thinking very seriously about something, but the fact she was wearing a flower crown with her pyjamas and fluffy slippers gave him pause. 

He leaned in the doorway, watching her for a while as she moved bits of paper around, oblivious to his presence. Rush smiled; he loved it when Belle got into her element. She was just as passionate about her topic of choice as he was when it came to physics, and despite the vast differences between them sometimes leading him to wonder how their paths ever crossed in the first place, he would always love her intensity. 

Presently he went over to her, slipping his arms around her waist and kissing her shoulder. Belle’s hands came down to rest on his, and he felt her giggle rather than hearing it. 

“Normally I’m the one coming down to find you here in the middle of the night, not the other way round.”

“I got lonely.”

Belle twisted in his arms to peck a kiss to his lips. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I never am when I leave you alone in bed.”

She snorted. “Well, that’s true.” A soft sigh escaped her. “I couldn’t sleep. Now that it’s so close, I keep worrying about it. I just want it to be perfect, you know?”

Rush nodded. “I know.”

He couldn’t fully understand the emotion himself. He was feeling very calm about the whole thing, possibly because he wasn’t anywhere near as invested in it as Belle was, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t recognise how important it was to Belle, talking her down from a precipice when she needed it and supporting her decisions when she didn’t. He’d left most of the preparation in her hands, always there if she needed him and willing to lend his hand and his decisions to whatever needed them, but really, this wedding was Belle’s dream, and he would let her have it. 

“You didn’t have this problem before, did you?”

“Gloria and I eloped. We got married in Gretna Green, it was only us and the minister and a couple of Glo’s friends who’d have killed her if she hadn’t invited them.”

Belle shook her head. “I can’t believe people still go to Gretna. You were both what, twenty-four? Surely you could just have got married anyway, even if her parents didn’t approve? There was no need to hop across the border.”

“I was twenty-three, actually, and of course we could have just got married anyway, but we thought that if we were going to be defiant, then we’d do it properly.”

“You’re a romantic at heart, you know. Maybe not big white wedding romantic, but there’s a bit of you that’s still squishy in the middle, even if you don’t like to admit it.” She prodded him in the stomach as if to prove it. 

“Ow! I’m beginning to have second thoughts about marrying you now.”

She turned fully in his arms, slipping her own around his neck and pulling him in for a kiss. “You love me really.”

“I do.”

“That comes later.” Belle sighed, carefully resting her head on his shoulder so as to avoid hitting him in the face with the flower crown. Rush still couldn’t work out why she was wearing it.

“The flowers?” he hedged. 

“I’m getting used to having it on my head,” she said. “I wear it all the time when you’re not here. I answered the door in it the other day and it took me a long time to realise why the mailman was looking at me strangely. “I don’t want to get to the big day and be so conscious of this thing on my head that I can’t focus on anything else. And I need to make sure you don’t get a face full of flowers every time I hug you, of course.”

“Of course.” He held her close for a while, looking over her shoulder at the whiteboard. “I’ll be glad when all this is over. I’ll finally get that board back. I’ve missed it for months.”

“Maybe you should be marrying the whiteboard instead of me.”

“It’s nowhere near as good a conversation partner.”

That was one of the reasons that he’d fallen in love with Belle in the first place. Rush was not a talkative person and never had been, but when Belle had fallen into his life and they had begun dating, that had changed. How he’d managed to divine that she was interested in him, and how he’d managed to divine that he was interested in her remained a mystery to this day; Rush would freely admit to not being the most astute when it came to these kinds of things.

Still, they’d managed to get together, and Rush, who had been able to go for over a week without saying anything to anyone outside of giving a lecture, found himself talking more in a one-hour coffee date than he’d done in the previous month. Belle was excited and passionate about everything; her enthusiasm towards life in general was infectious, and it had finally managed to get him to take an interest in the world again after so long burying his head in the sand with only his equations for company.

Presently, Belle gave a sigh, and she pulled the flower crown off her head, slipping out of Rush’s arms and placing it carefully back in its tissue-lined box. 

“I think that’s enough for one night,” she said. “It’ll all still be there in the morning.”

It was the same argument she’d used against him so many times when she’d come down in the small hours to find him frantically scribbling. None of it was going anywhere. Rush always argued that his ideas might go somewhere whilst he was asleep and he needed to get them down right now, as if it was a race against time before they slipped out of his brain. 

He said nothing, instead just taking Belle’s hand as she held it out to him, leading him back through the house towards their bed. It took them a while to set the sheets straight and get snuggled up back under the covers, and Belle sighed. 

“Tell me truthfully, Nick, are you looking forward to the big day?”

“I’m looking forward to being married to you,” he said. “So yes, I am looking forward to it.”

The wedding he could really take or leave. It wasn’t going to be ridiculously big - they didn’t know enough people to make it so, but it was still going to be a lot bigger and more expensive than his first one. 

But that didn’t matter. He had changed as a person since he was a young and headstrong (well, ok, he was still extremely headstrong even if he was no longer young) thing, angry at the world and running away with his English rose. His relationship with Belle was different to the one he’d shared with Gloria, and the two couldn’t be compared. It made sense for them to do things differently this time around. 

Belle gave a happy little yawn and closed her eyes, leaning in close against Rush’s shoulder, no doubt drifting off to dreams of flowers and seating arrangements. Rush pressed a kiss into her messy curls. He couldn’t wait to be her husband. 


End file.
